


Bring the Red Flare Again

by gloss



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Clothes Sharing, Extra Treat, Hand injury, M/M, Pre-TFA, Shaving, mild h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-23 07:01:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23007580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: Some time beforeThe Force Awakens, Lando and Poe run a mission together for Leia. A crash, injuries, and caretaking ensue, as do some (deliberately) missed opportunities.
Relationships: Lando Calrissian/Poe Dameron
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19
Collections: Writing Rainbow Red





	Bring the Red Flare Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



> Life moves out of a red flare of dreams  
>  Into a common light of common hours,  
>  Until old age bring the red flare again. — Yeats

“Don’t be mad,” Poe shouts over the roar of TIE cannon fire and the screech of life-support failure alarms, “but I’m going to have to crash your perfect, beautiful, heartbreakingly _rad_ ship!”

Lando has no time to reply before his exo suit inflates and Poe shoves the pod away. He falls backward, cradled in the pod, watching Poe’s face shrink and disappear, replaced by another enormous ion-cannon hit. Flames blossom and glow across the curved viewport. The sudden silence rings like metal bowls. The gloves on his suit are too thick to do much of any piloting as the pod drifts down to the lunar surface. The best he can do is nudge the direction here and there.

His personal yacht, the _Nephele_ , rains down in a thousand flaming shards. 

*

He finds Poe in the wreckage three hours later, in a lowland marsh pitted with sulfurous bubbles. Both his hands are burned terribly, his left arm is swollen, and he is coated head to toe in smoky grime. He’s only semi-conscious, which, honestly, makes cleaning him up a lot easier than it could be. Lando still recalls with a shudder the time he had to use tweezers to peel poison slug slime off a paralyzed, but very vocal, Han.

“The hell were you thinking?” Lando hands him a packet of bean soup and watches the kid tear into it with his usual voracious appetite.

Poe stops for a moment, surprised, mouth full. “What?”

“Short-routing through the Kysan sector was stupid,” Lando tells him. “And reckless. And —“

“We made it, though.”

“In pieces, without a ship, and you burned halfway to hell, yes.”

He grins at that and raises his packet in his two bacta-mittened hands as if to toast Lando. “Thanks for the save. And the clean-up.”

“I prefer to employ valets,” Lando says, “not act as one. Remember that.”

“Aye.” Poe mimes a salute and Lando shakes his head.

“Be more careful,” Lando says and very carefully does _not_ think about anything but right now and the young man across from him. Not the past, not others; there is no room for memory here.

“Can’t,” Poe replies and drains the packet.

They sleep for a while until moonrise. Might as well, since the dark is so absolute it would be suicide to try to move. When Lando’s scouts locate them, the dawn is trembling and lavender on the horizon.

“Aww,” Poe says when they’re loaded into the speeder. “I like camping!”

*

They reach Lando's villa on the far side of Malken-V twelve hours later than planned. There is a holo waiting from Leia, informing them that the hostage transfer on Malken-I has been canceled. Their mission has been reduced to a simple credit exchange.

“You’ll have to go alone.”

“What? No way!” Poe waves his hands, freshly wrapped with pure bacta. “How am I supposed to do this alone?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can run a drop-off like this in your sleep.”

“Sure, maybe.” Poe slumps down next to him. “Just, I thought we were partners.”

“Your partner’s got a bum knee and four decades on you.”

“Like I care.” Poe twists at the waist so he can meet Lando’s eye. He _doesn’t_ care; he is entirely sincere, which makes Lando feel even wearier. 

“My knee cares,” Lando tells him. “As do my shareholders and advisors.”

No one in his corporate hierarchy would be remotely impressed at the idea of the old man regressing like this to run ridiculous missions for yet another of Leia Organa’s idealistic causes.

“Your bandages should be off in seven hours.”

“Yeah,” Poe mutters. Close as he’s sitting, he sounds faraway, his chin down and arms crossed tightly over his chest.

Lando nudges him gently. “Stop sulking.”

A dimple winks in Poe’s cheek, close to his mouth. He fights a smile and loses. “Make me, _General_.”

*

Poe is a beautiful young man, all tousled curls and intense eyes, full mouth and neat, broad figure. Leia could have warned Lando about him, but all she’d said was that he was new to the Resistance and could use a bit of tempering.

“You want me to break in your recruits now?” Lando had asked, laughing, but Leia merely nodded. 

“He’s very good,” she replied. “Highly promising. But fairly untested.”

“Wherever do you find these wild men?”

“Prison,” she’d said, just before cutting the comm.

Lando’s own sources, once he’d fed in Poe’s eye scans and other biodata, suggested that he’d operated under a number of aliases, including Palo Bey and Shara Naberre. He was in local lockup down on Shigeru after a spice deal with Kanjiklub and independent brokers went violently south. 

“You dumped Kanji spice to make room for Markezz refugees?” Lando asked the first night they met, back on the _Nephele_.

Eyes darting, Poe scratched the back of his neck. “Who said that?”

“One of the Markezzine.”

“Oh. I dunno what to tell you.” He drained his glass and tried to look bored. “They paid really well?”

Chuckling, Lando pushed another platter of braised tuber toward the kid. “Sure they did, sure they did. Half-starving, on the run from debt-hunters, sure they did.”

Poe’s attempt to play cynical mercenary was about as flimsy as Lando’s favorite bed-hanging. How he’d survived in the spice trade, on Kijimi no less, for several years was anyone’s guess.

“Because I’m good at what I do,” Poe insisted when Lando said so the next day. “Why is that so hard for everyone to understand?”

“Everyone?” Lando tried to keep his tone mild in the face of his curiosity.

“Well, you. And the General.”

“Ah.”

Lando did not ask — he still doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know — whether Poe had visited Leia’s bed as well. He has his suspicions, of course; he and Leia share many tastes, always have. He avoided seeking confirmation of his suspicions all the same. This was new, in fact, and hell if he knew why he was suddenly shy about such issues. It was easy enough to blame advancing age here as it was elsewhere.

Poe slipped into Lando’s quarters that first night as if they were merely finishing their conversation. Shucked off his jersey and perched on the edge of the platform, head tilted, reached for Lando with a smile and hair toss. He kissed like he talked, both eagerly and in great volume, charmingly and solicitously. His hands sought out some of the softer, forgotten spots on Lando’s body, places that lit up to the touch, brought sweat springing and breath catching. He whispered compliments that Lando _believed_ , kissed him some more, slid to his knees and asked sweetly, almost shyly, to suck him off.

Lando’s hands tangled in the kid’s hair as his hips rolled, thrusting deep and slow, and Poe swallowed him down. His breath whistled out his nose, his face reddened and hands clutched at Lando’s thighs, and he kept wrapping his tongue and swallowing, eyes on Lando’s the entire time.

*

“Let me clean you up,” Lando says before they leave for the clinic to remove Poe’s bandages, then dinner and the spaceport. “It’s the least I can do.”

On his way to the fresher, Poe stops, shirt over his head, twisted in his bandaged hands, and looks back. “Yeah? I’ve got it. Mostly.”

“Please,” Lando says and means it. When Poe nods and grins, he follows him to the fresher.

He sits sidewise on the edge of the water cube, his bad knee straight out in front of him, and beckons Poe closer. The water sloshes a bit; Poe’s hair is plastered to his skull, which only makes his features bigger and more striking.

“Grow a beard faster than some Wookiees,” Lando comments as he works soap powder into a foam in his cupped palm. 

“We all need talents,” Poe replies. 

Lando tips up Poe’s chin, and his head falls back, hair hitting the water and fanning out. His eyes are closed, lashes dark as kohl. When Lando paints the foam over Poe’s cheeks and jaw, Poe sighs, once, and shivers.

“All right?” Lando asks.

“Yeah.”

At this angle, Poe’s body in the water is foreshortened, funny-looking, a broad chest and short, thick legs. Lando strops his second-best razor on its Bantha-leather case before drawing it down Poe’s cheek. He works carefully, neither slowly nor quickly, rinsing it after each stroke until bits of foam surround Poe’s shoulders like petals off a stonefruit tree. Each stroke snick-whisks through Poe’s heavy stubble, leaving smooth skin flushed from the heat, and ends with another short, happy sigh from Poe. Lando swallows a shiver himself after running the blade down the center of Poe’s throat. He remembers all too clearly how terrible Poe looked in the crash, how he moaned against the pain in his hands, the blisters across his chest. Skin is incredibly fragile, so easily torn, and here Lando is working an edge against it.

When he’s finished, the razor set aside, he scoops water in his palm and splashes Poe’s cheek. Poe dunks himself under the water, only to bob back up, laughing and clean-faced. He floats diagonally in the cube, water pooling on his chest, his cock heavy and half-hard against his thigh.

Lando rises with some difficulty, then pokes Poe with his cane. “Hurry up and dry off. Clothes are waiting for you.”

He has to help Poe with the breeches as well as the fastener on the cape. 

“You don’t have to do this,” Poe says quietly while Lando checks the cape’s hang. “I don’t have to be dressed up for —“

“You do,” Lando tells him, and pinches the cape at one shoulder, nudging it back to a better angle. The cape is one of his oldest, a vintage piece from the Old Republic, of grass-silk and delicately-glinting brocade. “Beautiful things deserve more beauty. They call to it.”

“Like sucking-midges to a lamp,” Poe says, smiling, and then he has Lando’s face in his hands and he kisses him. Drawing back, he says, “Thank you.”

*

Dinner is farewell. Three hours from now, Lando will be in bed, alone again, while Poe conducts the credit exchange. This time tomorrow, Poe will be back with Leia’s forces while Lando will be wrapping up a series of incredibly boring meetings. 

They’ve had a good time together — a great time, even. 

“The greatest, I’d say.” Poe waves at the serving droid to pour another round of thick, sweet Yavin punch. Finally free from its bandages, his hand’s unsteady, his cheeks flushed. Lando reminds himself to double-check that Poe puffs on the sobriety nebulizer before they part.

“Despite everything,” Lando says lightly. “I did love that yacht.”

“Eh,” Poe replies, lifting a shoulder and rolling his eyes. “What’re you gonna do, right?”

His confidence is beautiful. There’s arrogance there, to be sure, but most of it is earned and none of it sour. He has very little to lose — a condition with which Lando was, at one time, all too familiar — but there’s no desperation, no restless grasping. In their place, Dameron has only smiles and whistles.

“I don’t know,” Lando says, not for the first time, but probably for the last, “how the galaxy hasn’t chewed you up and spit you back out yet.”

Poe shakes a few curling locks from his forehead. “Guess I just taste too good.”

Lando has to laugh. And, laughing, shaking his head, he feels tears prickle at his eyes. He’s growing more sentimental by the day in his dotage, and sweet wines never did agree with him.

“Speaking of which...” Poe says, lowering his voice and leaning in.

He wears that cape like he was born to it, reared in all the old customs. Lando licks the corner of his mouth and sighs.

“If we weren't running late,” he says, “if we hadn't crashed, perhaps there would be time.”

Poe's mouth twists in disappointment; he is nothing but tells. He might as well be constantly shouting. Their knees brush under the small table. “Next time, then.”

Lando agrees, and Poe smiles, satisfied, never catching the bluff.


End file.
